Pham Hung, 75, Prime Minister Of Vietnam and Early Rebel, Dies

AP

Published: March 12, 1988

BANGKOK, Thailand, March 11—
Pham Hung, the Prime Minister of Vietnam, died of a heart attack Thursday. He was 75 years old.

The Vietnamese radio, quoting official statements, said that Mr. Hung died ''while working in Ho Chi Minh City and other southern provinces.''

It added that the Council of Ministers, the Cabinet, named a Deputy Prime Minister, Vo Van Kiet, as Acting Prime Minister until the National Assembly chooses a successor. Mr. Kiet, who is his late 70's, is chairman of the State Planning Commission.

Mr. Hung, who replaced Pham Van Dong as Prime Minister last June, was a member of a small group of Vietnamese revolutionaries who took up radical politics in their teens, joined the Communist Party in the 1930's and over the next half-century guided it to victories over the French, Japanese and Americans.

Some Western diplomats say that in recent years, Mr. Hung had been in poor health and did not have a central policy role.

Mr. Hung was born on June 11, 1912, in Vinh Long Province, now called Cuu Long Province, in the Mekong River Delta of southern Vietnam. Imprisoned on Island

At the age of 16, he declared himself a radical, his activities eventually leading to his expulsion from secondary school. He joined the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930, the year it was founded by Ho Chi Minh. The next year, Mr. Hung was arrested by the French authorities and sentenced to death.

After the sentence was commuted, he spent the next decade and a half in hard labor on a prison island. He was released when Communist forces came to power in Hanoi in 1945 and spent the next nine years of the war for independence against the French in key party positions in southern Vietnam.

With the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Mr. Hung rose rapidly in party and Government ranks and returned to North Vietnam. He entered the Politburo in 1956 and two years later became Deputy Prime Minister of North Vietnam.

He played key roles from 1960 to 1975 in the war against the American-backed Government of South Vietnam. He was sent south in 1967 as secretary of the South Vietnam Commission of the party's Central Committee and as political commissar of the Vietcong guerrilla movement.

In 1975, he served as political commissar during the final North Vietnamese offensive that led to the capture of Saigon on April 30.

He became a Deputy Prime Minister in 1976, and in 1980 was named Interior Minister. At the December 1986 party congress, he moved up to the No. 2 slot in the party Politburo, behind the new general secretary, Nguyen Van Linh.

Last year, he was replaced as Interior Minister in a major Government reshuffle. In June, possibly as a transition step, the National Assembly named him to replace Mr. Dong as Prime Minister.